Report: Humanitarian reasons didn't justify Iraq war

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I thought this article from the Christian Science Monitor interesting:

http://csmonitor.com/2004/0127/dailyUpdate.html

If people want to discuss it, I think it interesting in terms of when humanitarian military interventions are justifiable - and when, perhaps, it is unjustifiable NOT to make them.

Er, if this topic gets of fthe ground, it would be soooo great if people discussed the issues, not each other.......looks pleadingly around....

What do you think of the criteria for humanitarian intervention as outlined here?

Report: Humanitarian reasons didn't justify Iraq war

Human Rights Watch dismisses one of the Bush administration's main arguments for the invasion.

By Matthew Clark | csmonitor.com

As the months roll by without any discovery of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the Bush administration has increasingly emphasized Saddam Hussein's brutality and human rights violations as an important justification for the preemptive war it launched to overthrow his regime. After former chief US weapons inspector David Kay announced over the weekend that Iraq did not possess any WMD stockpiles before the war, the White House has backed off the claim that had been its main justification for the war.

But a leading advocacy group, Human Rights Watch (HRW), released a report Monday challenging the administration's other main justification. The report said that the war in Iraq should not be justified as a defense of human rights. In its annual report, the independent, nongovernmental organization argues that, because there was no ongoing or imminent mass killing when the conflict began, the war was not necessary to stop such atrocities.

"The Bush administration cannot justify the war in Iraq as a humanitarian intervention, and neither can Tony Blair," said Kenneth Roth, the group's executive director. The mass killing of Kurds in 1988 (often cited by US President George W. Bush) would have justified humanitarian intervention, Mr. Roth said.

"But such interventions should be reserved for stopping an imminent or ongoing slaughter," he said. "They shouldn't be used belatedly to address atrocities that were ignored in the past."

The report also praised US and British forces for striving to minimize civilian casualties during the air campaign, and also for being much more careful in the use of cluster bombs than in previous conflicts, points out The Independent.

London director of Human Rights Watch, Steve Crawshaw, told Radio Free Europe that "humanitarian intervention can only come as a final option to stop mass killing, such as the Rwanda genocide of 1994."

"The justification for humanitarian intervention has to be the real, current threat that is there," Mr. Crawshaw said. "Otherwise, you have the chance of just launching wars left, right, and center, frankly, when a powerful government feels that it is in its power, in its right, to launch a war. And that's the really dangerous pattern that's being set."

Radio Free Europe also cites Nile Gardner, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank, as saying that HRW should be heralding Hussein's ouster. "The Iraqi people are immensely better off now that Saddam Hussein is gone, and it is quite extraordinary that a leading human-rights watchdog is claiming that this was the wrong thing for the West to do."

The Associated Press reports that US Attorney General John Ashcroft said Monday that even if WMD are never found in Iraq, the US-led war was justified because it eliminated the threat that Saddam Hussein might again resort to "evil chemistry and evil biology."

British foreign minister Jack Straw insisted Monday that the war was justified, reports Reuters. "I believe the decision we made on March 18 to take military action was justified then in terms of enforcing international law and is still more justified now," Mr. Straw told reporters. "We have removed a terrible tyrant, we have found scores of thousands of graves of people who were murdered by the Saddam regime."

Meanwhile, the usually reclusive US Vice President Dick Cheney, is "suddenly all over the place" in the words of The Straits Times of Singapore. And he is staunchly defending the Iraq war amid a barrage of tough questions fired from reporters at every stop along his visit to Europe. The Washington Post reports that the design of his five-day tour to drum up more European support in the fight against terrorism and in promoting democracy "has been eclipsed by a spate of questions about his part in the decision to go to war in Iraq and in selling it to the public."

A New York Times editorial raises concern about Mr. Cheney's insistance last week that Iraq had been trying to make WMD.
The vice president's myopia suggests a breathtaking unwillingness to accept a reality that conflicts with the administration's preconceived notions. This kind of rigid thinking helped propel us into an invasion without broad international support and, if Mr. Cheney is as influential as many say, could propel us into further misadventures down the road.

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Kenneth Roth wrote:

"But such interventions should be reserved for stopping an imminent or ongoing slaughter . . . They shouldn't be used belatedly to address atrocities that were ignored in the past."

Steve Crawshaw wrote:

"The justification for humanitarian intervention has to be the real, current threat that is there . . . "Otherwise, you have the chance of just launching wars left, right, and center, frankly, when a powerful government feels that it is in its power, in its right, to launch a war. And that's the really dangerous pattern that's being set."

These two sum it up for me. The intervention in Kosovo fits into the category, and the failure to intervene in Bosnia stands out as a distinct failure of the European Union, for all their self-congratulatory preening. To characterize the Iraqi war as an humanitarian intervention is the foulest sort of self-justificatory venality, in my never humble opinion.

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I agree - I think the attempt to paint Iraq II as a humanitarian intervention is ridiculous - but I find it interesting to look at clear criteria being proposed for such things - ( I am sure such criteria are well known in the communities who regularly debate such things, but, set out so succinctly, they are interesting to me.)

Rwanda also stands out, no?

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The tragedy of Rwanda, as was the case in Nigeria/Biafra in 1968, is heightened by the all-too-obvious extent to which no one cared.

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War is never justified.

Sometimes it's necessary.

How many more people will die if we go to war?

How many more people will die if we don't?

Innocent people are being killed.

Innocent people were killed.

And the common thread that binds us all together is the fact that we all want peace. We just have different ideas of how to obtain it. I personally can endure much suffering before I get the urge to strike back. But, I can get the urge to strike back.

People who have felt the weight of tyranny lifted from their shoulders thank us while the rest of the world debates our civil actions with civil tongues and civil things in civil rings. If we leave a people to suffer, we have learned very little about civility.

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Interesting. HRW also includes in their criteria whether or not the government of a country invites outside military assistance and in that they mention Côte d'Ivoire, Liberia and Chad as examples where outside military involvement is justified. These were civil wars and (depending on which one you look at) military involvement was requsted by the prior government in some cases and by the rebel forces in others.

So if the Kurds in Iraq requested the US come in does that make it legit?

In reading HRW's report it looks like they left their "criteria" so vague they can modifiy it to fit whatever rationale they want the outcome to be.

Quote:

"But such interventions should be reserved for stopping an imminent or ongoing slaughter," he said. "They shouldn't be used belatedly to address atrocities that were ignored in the past."

This is an interesting comment from the report. On March 11, 2003 HRW issued reports detailing the common use of torture in Iraqi prisons and mass numbers of people killed during those tortures (which HRW referred to as "Prison Cleansings") and on March 14th, 2003 they released a report deploring the forced relocation of Kurds, Turkomans, and Assyrians in Iraq.

Based on their own earlier reports they can't deny that there weren't real and current human rights violations going on in Iraq enmass so they qualified their position with "They shouldn't be used belatedly to address atrocities that were ignored in the past".

I don't much agree with the Bush re-positioning of humanitarian reasoning as being the primary reason for going into Iraq but I'm dubious of "critera" that are established after the fact to generate a press report.

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Fishin': Why do you assume the criteria were adopted to generate a press report? Or, if they were, is this not a legitimate response and contribution to global thinking by such an organisation in the face of the current claims about the reasons for the war? I would assume that HRW would have a policy on such matters? I mean, I don't KNOW, but neither do you?

The stuff about the prisons is interesting and raises all sorts of questions of relativities. How many being killed in prison is too many? At what point might human rights invasion of the, for instance, USA be justified if judicial killing continues? If it rises? If it continues to be predominantly blacks?

The Kurds thing is interesting too - my guess would be that - based on its stated criteris - the HRW would have considered invasion to be justified when Saddam was massacring them using chemical weapons - and perhaps after Iraq I, when they rose up and were massacred again. What do you think? What would your criteria be?

hmmm - I would see that the Kurds - based on how things were before Iraq II - might as justifiably asked for an invasion of Turkey.

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Michael Allen - yes - but, what would be your criteria for a "humanitarian" war?

When would you see the need for such outweighing the obvious injury to the fabric of national self-determination and sovereignty and the risk that the powerful just go about invading at whim, and justifying it this way?

These are genuine questions.

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dlowan wrote:

Fishin': Why do you assume the criteria were adopted to generate a press report? Or, if they were, is this not a legitimate response and contribution to global thinking by such an organisation in the face of the current claims about the reasons for the war? I would assume that HRW would have a policy on such matters? I mean, I don't KNOW, but neither do you?

Well, perhaps I don't KNOW but they themselves said in their own report that they didn't. Are ya callin' 'em liars bunny??? Wink

If they had a prior criteria I would think they would have applied it BEFORE the war instead of not commenting on the legitimacy of the war before-hand one way or the other.

Quote:

The stuff about the prisons is interesting and raises all sorts of questions of relativities. How many being killed in prison is too many? At what point might human rights invasion of the, for instance, USA be justified if judicial killing continues? If it rises? If it continues to be predominantly blacks?

The Kurds thing is interesting too - my guess would be that - based on its stated criteris - the HRW would have considered invasion to be justified when Saddam was massacring them using chemical weapons - and perhaps after Iraq I, when they rose up and were massacred again. What do you think? What would your criteria be?

That's why, IMO, the qualification of not interfering when someone didn't interfere before is problematic. If Japan (just to pick a country at random) imprisons a Pakistani and no one blinks is that a green light for them to imprison all Pakistanis in Japan? The two are obviously very different things but I don't see how anyone can qualify when/where the slippery slope begins and have any one set standard apply in all cases.

Quote:

hmmm - I would see that the Kurds - based on how things were before Iraq II - might as justifiably asked for an invasion of Turkey.

They use a matrix of 7 or 8 criteria so the Kurds, to satisfy HRW anyway, would have to meet some "check off" for the rest of them too. I'm not opposed to the UN or some group developing this type of a criteria and what they've used may be a good starting point.

I'd hate to be sitting around watching 20,000 people get slaughtered just because their government hasn't reached some sort of magic number though. Any criteria developed would be entirely subjective methinks.

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You'd think that conservatives -- with their jaundiced view of human nature, and their sensitivity to abuses of official power -- would understand the pitfalls of sending American troops and American bureaucrats to invade, occupy and "civilize" another country.

They certainly seemed to understand them when Clinton was president.

You would also think that conservatives would want to set some fairly rigorous standards for humanitarian intervention -- lest some future president from the other party use the same blank check they have written George W. Bush.

But, of course, if those things were true, we wouldn't have invaded Iraq on humanitarian grounds, as the administration now claims.

We would have done it for some far more sensible reason -- like, say, to prevent Saddam from using his awesome weapons of mass destruction to strike the American homeland.

Or something like that.

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"Well, perhaps I don't KNOW but they themselves said in their own report that they didn't. Are ya callin' 'em liars bunny???"

LOL!!!! Bull's eye - blush....still thinkin' and considerin' the rest of your post...

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PDiddie wrote:

You'd think that conservatives -- with their jaundiced view of human nature, and their sensitivity to abuses of official power -- would understand the pitfalls of sending American troops and American bureaucrats to invade, occupy and "civilize" another country.

They certainly seemed to understand them when Clinton was president.

You would also think that conservatives would want to set some fairly rigorous standards for humanitarian intervention -- lest some future president from the other party use the same blank check they have written George W. Bush.

But, of course, if those things were true, we wouldn't have invaded Iraq on humanitarian grounds, as the administration now claims.

We would have done it for some far more sensible reason -- like, say, to prevent Saddam from using his awesome weapons of mass destruction to strike the American homeland.

Or something like that.

PDiddie - forgive bluntness - yes, yes, yes conservatives/liberals suck/are the root of all evil etc - this is a given...but - what do you think of the criteria? What would yours be, if any? When might such an invasion be justified?

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I think it is worth taking note of the reasons for "intervention" in the past, such as Louis Phillipe's liberal monarchy intervening in Spain, ostensibly to end the abuses of the Inquisition, coincidental to the triumph of the Carlists over a liberal government. Gustav II Adolf intervened in the Thirty Years War as a champion of the Protestants, but after his untimely (and foolish) death, Oxensteirne (sp?--his chancellor, and the regent for his toddler daughter, Christina, when she came to the throne) stayed in it for what could reasonably be called imperialist, dynastic and even venal motives. France, Spain and England intervened in Mexico after the Liberals won the War of the Reform on the basis of collecting debts for their citizens, which had been incurred by the Conservative government, but which they insisted Juarez must honor. There never was so trumped up and convenient an excuse for intervention than the separation of the province of Panama from the rest of Columbia by the United States--bent on digging its big ditch. Truer words were never spoken in the United States Senate than when Senator Hiakawa of California said of the Canal: "It's ours, we stole it, fair and square, we should keep it." When Louis Bonaparte, the soi-disant Napoleon III intervened against Austria in Italy, the slaughter was so horrible that he personally never went to war again, and he was so horrified at the prospect of Cavour and Garibaldi's prospects for creating a unified Italy, that he sent troops to Rome to "protect the pope"--anyone familiar with France's religious history knows what an exquisite bit of hypocricy that was.

In view of what intervention had meant in the past, and what the real motives are in this specific case, i think it high time that the human race took the concept of law governing conflict (i.e., as in the Hague Conventions and the Geneva Convention) to a newer, more rational level. I would personally be pleased to think that we, the human race, are making some progress in eliminating tribalism and establishing precedents of humanitarian motive in military operations. Such an idea means to me an all the more urgent need not to do invasions such as that in Iraq, without a genuine international coalition. (Pacem, conservatives, anyone with any sense knows the alleged "coalition of the willing" was a cesspool of collusion and grasping for favors or rewards by the governments who played along--Blair was opposed by many in his nation, as were Howard in Oztralia and Aznar of Spain.)

This is not unprecedented, by the way. After the horrors of the Thrity Years War--and especially the harrying of the Palatine--largely as a result of dynastic, monarchical rule, there was a tacit understanding that the peasants were not to be mollested in war, and armies were not to loot the countryside. The resultant discipline worked to the advantage of the commanders, and it was largely observed. When Marlborough and Eugene harried Bavaria in 1704, they were roundly condemned, including criticism from rulers within their coalition. It could happen; if this is evidence that it may happen, i applaud it, despite criticism of the timing of HRW or questions of their motives.

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I'll go along with what the people who authored the report in the link you cited say, bun:

Quote:

If this high threshold is met, we then look to five other factors to determine whether the use of military force can be characterized as humanitarian. First, military action must be the last reasonable option to halt or prevent slaughter; military force should not be used for humanitarian purposes if effective alternatives are available. Second, the intervention must be guided primarily by a humanitarian purpose; we do not expect purity of motive, but humanitarianism should be the dominant reason for military action. Third, every effort should be made to ensure that the means used to intervene themselves respect international human rights and humanitarian law; we do not subscribe to the view that some abuses can be countenanced in the name of stopping others. Fourth, it must be reasonably likely that military action will do more good than harm; humanitarian intervention should not be tried if it seems likely to produce a wider conflagration or significantly more suffering. Finally, we prefer endorsement of humanitarian intervention by the U.N. Security Council or other bodies with significant multilateral authority. However, in light of the imperfect nature of international governance today, we would not require multilateral approval in an emergency context.

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dlowan wrote:

Michael Allen - yes - but, what would be your criteria for a "humanitarian" war?

When would you see the need for such outweighing the obvious injury to the fabric of national self-determination and sovereignty and the risk that the powerful just go about invading at whim, and justifying it this way?

These are genuine questions.

Ironically, a humanitarian war puts an end or attempts to end pain and suffering. Americans are often drawn to defend the underdog, our hearts stumble over our logic. We were once the underdog ourselves. Just as I can't watch a beating in front of my house or defenseless child shiver in the cold, I can't stand when loyal people are betrayed by the very leadership they trust. I don't make exuses for my own either.

The American leadership is a bit off track trying to be the world's big brother and taking the lunch money after. But, when a country has so much to offer and a valuable resource such as oil to keep it prosperous, the leadership destroying its great potential needs ousted. For the world's sake. Hitler would have been using Jews as test subjects for many years had it not been for intervention.

Yes, Ghandi and Mother Theresa taught us well how to change the world without one strike. But, you can't always turn the other cheek, fast or sit-in. Sometimes, it's necessary to show force and mean it. Slap the bully and let him know he's not boss of the playground any longer. And, you know, it just feels good too.

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Fishin' wrote:

"That's why, IMO, the qualification of not interfering when someone didn't interfere before is problematic. If Japan (just to pick a country at random) imprisons a Pakistani and no one blinks is that a green light for them to imprison all Pakistanis in Japan? The two are obviously very different things but I don't see how anyone can qualify when/where the slippery slope begins and have any one set standard apply in all cases."

I don't get the first part of your paragraph, Fishin - the second part, the slippery slope, is a crux.

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Report: Humanitarian reasons didn't justify Iraq war

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